The Kraken Wakes

Adrian Tchaikovsky announced the other day that he and Emma Newman were starting a new podcast: Starship Alexandria, where they will take turns recommending sci-fi and fantasy books, with most of the episode devoted to discussing them. Their first episode dropped a couple of weeks ago, and Newman made the first recommendation: The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham.

This is a classic science fiction novel from 1953 that I had never heard of. I had heard of Wyndham and a few of his other books but not this particular one. The story sounded interesting so I decided to check it out.

Whenever I read old novels, particularly sci-fi, I’m reminded of how tight old school writing used to be, and how fast paced the books were. This is no exception. The story told here in 246 pages is one that would take at least 500 pages with contemporary approaches, assuming it wasn’t made into a trilogy or larger series. There’s a lot to be said for telling an epic scale story in a manner that can be completed in a couple of days.

This is an alien invasion story, but with a twist. It begins with fireballs entering the atmosphere. All of them go into the sea, entering the deepest parts of the oceans. The selectivity implies an intelligence behind whatever is going on. A few of the fireballs are shot at, and immediately explode, implying they were containers under high pressure.

Attempts are made to send submersibles down to the ocean depths, but whatever is down there destroys them, killing the crew. When ships passing over the deep regions start to be attacked and sunk, various militaries send atomic bombs down. A few make it down and detonate. But at some point, the bombs stop detonating, as though something is capturing and disabling them. As the sinkings become increasingly common, ships start having to avoid the deepest parts of the ocean, crashing world trade.

All of this takes place over a period of years. The story is told through the eyes of Mike Watson. He and his wife Phyllis work in Britain as reporters for the EBC, a fictional competitor to the BBC. Mike and Phyllis are at a few key events in the story, but most of the narrative is based on news from around the world as they’re able to glean it.

This book has some interesting innovations for a 1953 novel. The invaders’ technology is very alien. Their method of attacking ships appears to be based on some kind of focused vibrations. At a certain point they send biological robots to attack island and coastal regions. And eventually, they attack humanity by melting the polar ice caps, causing sea levels worldwide to rise. It’s hard to read these portions of the novel today without thinking about climate change.

The most interesting thing about this novel is how little is able to be learned about the aliens, and how people react to the limited information. For a long time there is a debate whether it even is aliens. Conspiracy theories run rampant before the evidence becomes overwhelming.

There is speculation that their natural habitat must be a high pressure one, possibly Jupiter. (This is never confirmed, saving the novel from being too outdated.) Which, it is thought, is why they target the deepest regions of Earth’s oceans. Early on there are arguments about whether, due to the different environment they live in, there’s any necessary reason for hostilities between them and humanity.

A recurring theme in the book is how people react over the years as information becomes available, and to proposals about what needs to be done. Politics, business interests, and just overall refusal to accept what’s happening, keep getting in the way. This happens so much throughout the novel, that if I’d read it before Covid, I might have found it too cynical. Today it seems prescient.

Of course, Wyndham was writing this book in the early Cold War years, when memory of World War II was still fresh. His memories of those events would include the often ugly realities, instead of the heroic stories most of us grew up with. Strangely enough, I find it comforting to realize people in the past were just as blinkered in their reactions.

A minor spoiler. We never meet the aliens. There is never a conversation with them. They’re just too different. They are only known through their effects. The closest we get is speculation about what they might be like. I’m generally not a fan of sci-fi that never shows the damn aliens. (It seems like it became a popular move after 2001 A Space Odyssey, but Kubrick didn’t show his aliens because 1960s technology couldn’t do it well.) That said, in this book it ends up fitting with the theme of having to work with limited information.

Overall I enjoyed the book and recommend it. The Godzilla theme song kept running through my head as I read it. It had that kind of feel. (BTW, Godzilla Minus One, if you haven’t seen it yet, a damn good movie!)

Often when I recommend old books, it has to be with caveats about the quality of the writing or social attitudes in the story, but not this time. It’s aged relatively well. Which isn’t to say it isn’t very dated, but not in a way that I found too distracting.

Worth checking out if you’d like a quick read!

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Short Story Review: Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953)

This is the 20th post in my series of vintage generation ship short fiction reviews. You are welcome to read and discuss along with me as I explore humanity’s visions of generational voyage. And thanks go out to all who have joined already. I also have compiled an extensive index of generation ship SF if you wish to track down my earlier reviews on the topic and any that you might want to read on your own.

Previously: Fred Saberhagen’s “Birthdays” (1976)

Next Up: TBD

• Uncredited cover for Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, ed. L. B. Cole (September 1953)

3.25/5 (Above Average)

Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953) first appeared in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, ed. L. B. Cole (September 1953). You can read it online here.

Anderson’s tale is a fascinating collision of two of my recurring interests in post-WWII science fiction: generation ships and organized labor. Due to my love of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost” (2002) and Brian W. Aldiss’ Non-Stop (variant title: Starship) (1959), I started a review series on generation ship short fiction in 2019. The series has languished recently as I am running out of pre-1985 depictions of the theme available in English to read. I read Anderson’s vision last year but could not muster a review. However, my recent focus on organized labor caused me to reread Anderson’s account of generational conflict, the working class experience, and the contours of power and government.

“The Troublemakers” ruminates on the type of society that should exist in the intermediary generations between departure and arrival. Some authors speculate that stasis (often achieved via religion or indoctrinating ritual) or decadence (the loss of knowledge about the voyage) would set in the generations after departure from Earth. Anderson, on the other hand, examines the role of deliberate instability to combat stasis and decadence in the grand colonizing scheme. Recommended for diehard fans of the history of generation ship stories (me!) or Poul Anderson completists.

The Nature of the Voyage

The Pioneer, a vast generation ship six miles long and two miles wide, replete with massive parks, hydroponics bays, and entertainment facilities sets off from Earth to Centauri. Only partially constructed in order to give the crew something to do for the first generation, the original crew of 200 hundred men and women is planned to rise to 10k by the time of arrival.1

The story follows the youthful Ensign Evan Friday, a rising officer in the Astrogation caste (“the aristocracy of the aristocracy”), who starts to wonder about the corrupt nature of his world: “Eighty years later, what do we have? An unending succession of tyrannies, revolutions, tensions, hatreds, corruptions—all the social evils which Earth so painfully overcome, reborn between the stars” (3). He’s accused by the Captain and his Council, a representative from each of the major factions, on the “flimsiest tissue of fabrications” (3) of gross misconduct and is stripped of “all title, honor, and privilege” (4). Instead of execution, he’s assigned a common crewman position with the Engineering section (4). He must put aside his snooty elitism and learn to excel in the world of the common laborer. Friday, who yearns for a ship refocused on the grandeur of its mission and cured of its corruption, slowly rises up from the bottom. He befriends fellow workers. He attends union meetings. He watches the demagoguery of the union representative Wilson. He sees how power functions from another perspective.

Eventually, as tensions threaten to explode between different groups, Evan falls in with the rising correlate of the American middle class–small-scale artisans and business owners–who begin to organize their own Guilds. With Evan’s leadership, the Guilds start to flex their muscles and angle for their voice to be heard. And eventually Evan must learn the true shape of things.

Final Thoughts

Due to rise of fascism abroad in the intra-war period, there was a resurgence of interest among psychologists in the validity of crowd psychology.2 In this formulation, the public manifests an opinion that is a “latent disease state, subject to turbulent infection at unpredictable moments.”3 Far from a uniquely foreign occurrence, psychologists on the Homefront identified similarly troubling tendencies.4 Fearful of similar unrest at home, psychologists in the post-WWII moment positioned themselves as the experts needed design “democratic personalities and predict emotional surges in national and international tension.”5 In short, psychologists defended social engineering.

I bring this historical context up as the final conclusion of“The Troublemakers” (1953) directly echoes this sense that psychologists are the guarantees of a more socially progressive and stable future–socially engineering must occur. Anderson’s suspicion of traditional societal organizing institutions and concepts–unions, guilds, class, etc.6–echoes 50s views on the growing centrality of the expert in informing policy. Anderson deliberately ignores mentioning institutional religion. Instead, the idealism of the frontier liminal space that must be conquered takes on an almost religious imperative and forms the ideological thrust of the story. After World War II, psychologists saw themselves as guiding America towards a more democratic future. In parallel, psychologists in Anderson’s story socially engineer a system to contain and encourage particular types of behaviors that will culminate in a generation suitable to colonize.

In addition, Anderson’s take on unions echoes some strands of contemporary 50s criticism. As I’ve discussed at length previously and reproduce here in broad strokes, during the Great Depression there was broad consensus among leftist thinkers that the labor movement would lead to radical change. The Second World War and the economic recovery shattered that consensus.7 They struggled to grapple with an economic system they had expected to collapse and the lack of interest in socialism within American unions. Within unions, the political and social transformation of capitalism became secondary to preserving their organizations and maintaining a harmonious relationship with industry.8 On the right, American corporate powers and their conservative congressional allies unleashed a “propaganda campaign” against the labor movement.9

Where does Poul Anderson fit into this political scenario? Unlike H. Beam Piper’s “Day of the Moron” (1951), Anderson’s story isn’t reactionary or alarmist in a visceral sense despite his critical take on unions. He describes unions (in the story they organize lower class workers) and guilds (described as more middle-class) as an important means to protect against monopolistic oppression. However, unions leaders like Wilson–characterized with crass physical cliches like obesity to indicate his corruption–utilize demagoguery to control the masses. Evan Friday’s coming-of-age sojourn amongst the lower classes does cause him to see Wilson’s manipulation and dismiss the Communist views of many union members. The radical potential of unions will simply lead to more cycles of oppression under a Stalinist dictatorship. Unions might have immediate value in their desire to protect the worker from oppression or advocate for a previously ignored voice but the expert psychologist must channel policy to heal the larger population. Friday leaves with a deep appreciation of the working-class struggle. Anderson positions him as an empathetic leader who will defer to the intellectual elite.

As a literary experience, I’m not convinced of the merit of “The Troublemakers” (1951). As a means to extrapolate from contemporary 50s politics within the distilled world of a generation ship, Anderson provides a fascinating range of political ruminations that ultimately demonstrate his deep distrust of “large, encompassing systems,”10 belief in the dangerous potential of crowd psychology, and skepticism that there is a true political system.11 Anderson conjures a version of a sociological view popularized in 1956 by C. Wright Mills that a “power elite”–a web of industrial, military, and corporate interests–dictates from behind the scenes. Unlike Mills, as long as the power elite are guided by experts who will make sure humans can conquer the new frontier (and minimize human casualties), he’s okay with it.

Notes

1. I found this detail–partial construction–fascinating. While not discussed in detail, the implication is that the crew could complete large sections of the interior to suit their interests and needs over the generations. This gives the opportunity for a laboring class to be firmly entrenched in the ship. ↩︎
2. See Ch. 3, “The Dilemmas of Democratic Morale” of Ellen Herman’s brilliant The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (1995), 48-81. ↩︎
3. Herman, 55. ↩︎
4. Herman examines numerous psychological studies of the US military. ↩︎
5. Herman, 81. ↩︎
6. There’s substantial scholarship on the image of the American West transposed into the future. For example, Carl Abbott’s Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (2006), which does not mention Anderson’s story. Anderson’s story is a bog standard, but illuminative, example. If you’re interested in revisionist takes on the West in SF that would enrich Abbott’s take substantially, check out Craig Strete’s corpus of works typified by “When They Find You” (1977) and William Tenn’s “Eastward Ho!” (1958). ↩︎
7. Jeffrey W. Coker’s Confronting American Labor: The New Left Dilemma (2002), 51. ↩︎
8. See Ch. 19, “Retrenchment, Cold War, and Consolidation, 1946-1955,” of Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin’s Labor in America: A History, 9th edition (2017), 303-320. ↩︎
9. See Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (1994). She describes both a local and a national campaign. ↩︎
10. See Anderson’s obituary for a brief discussion of his politics. ↩︎
11. For more on his politics, check out this interesting article. ↩︎

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